November 14, 2009.
Everyone knew the home leg of the All Whites
inter-continental playoff was going to be a sporting occasion. I don’t think
anyone, in their wildest dreams, thought it would end up like that.
Everyone knows the sporting story; the All Whites win 1-0
thanks to a Rory Fallon header. Mark Paston saves a penalty. The whole country
goes potty. That’s the bit everyone knows and everyone appreciates. However
there are only 37,000 people who will truly know what that night was like. Luckily,
I was one of them.
Wellington had become the Nation’s football capital through
its support of the Phoenix. Yellow Fever had grown and all of a sudden an
‘active support’ culture was developing. Supporters of the Kingz and Knights
would argue that it already existed, Yellow Fever, as far as I am concerned,
made it mainstream though.
Wellington got awarded the rights for the match following a
pretty comprehensive tender process, the easy thing for NZF to do would have
been to take it to North Harbour. They normally took the easy option, and it
normally turned out to be the wrong option. It was now up to Wellington to
support it.
I am trying to write these pieces from feel as opposed to
doing any actual research, so some of my dates and timelines might be off. We
played the first leg of the qualifier in October. At that point sales had been
steady, I seem to remember a rush on the Thursday before the first leg to buy
White Noise zone tickets as the zone had almost sold out. I can’t remember if
it was true or not but it was indicative of what was happening just below the
surface in the build-up to this game, people were excited.
I watched the first leg at some ungodly hour of the morning
at Four Kings, it was that time of day when you had to make the decision to
either stay up all night (as many at Four Kings seemingly had) or get up early
and ruin a perfectly good Sunday morning sleep in. I went with the latter,
picked my Dad up from the hotel he was staying at for the weekend and off we
drove to the Kings. It was pretty chocka and the crowd rode the game like the
All Whites rode their luck. It wasn’t pretty but a 0-0 job got the draw done
and made Wellington very very real. I guess there were plenty of people who
thought we would get smacked in Bahrain and Wellington wouldn’t matter, I was
probably one of them. Now people believed.
Again, this may be my memory making this up but I think the
game had sold out by the middle of the week after. ‘Football fans’ whinged that
people had bought the tickets and all of a sudden those same tickets were on
TradeMe. They, the real fans were therefore missing out, ummmm….if you were a
real fan, you would have bought your ticket before the Bahrain game!
Anywho, November 14 rolled around. It had been a pretty
eventful week for me. I finished University on the Thursday and had our End of
Season awards do on the Friday night, I managed to keep myself under control on
Friday night as feeling iffy on the Saturday simply wasn’t an option.
We kicked off the day with a BBQ on our shittly little charcoal burner at our flat in
Thordon, from every room of the house we could see into the stadium. So calm,
so peaceful, so nervous! A mid-afternoon visit to Four Kings was required as
well as some cash outlaid in novelty shops to buy anything white we could get
our hands on; white sheets, silver fern stickers, NZ sweatbands. We had them
all. We were ready… but it was only 4 o’clock. A nervous few ales on the
Terrace before heading to the Backbencher and it all started to get very real.
As we walked around the front of Parliament buildings we came across a group of
Bahranians, the king/sultan/dictator or whatever he is/was had chartered the
biggest plane to ever fly into Wellington and had bought the
team/fans/journalists into town, they were singing, clapping and what not
across the road from White Noise spiritual home – The Backbencher. The
atmosphere at the pub was amazing, a couple of renditions of the National
Anthem as well as a few other goodies and we were on the way to the ground.
We had decided to go in to the ground early and it was
probably at this point that the magnitude of the occasion dawned on me.
Already, the ground was a third full perhaps and everyone was in white, not
just a few people had got behind the ‘white-out’ campaign but almost everybody
had – it was simply amazing. The All Whites were already out on the pitch
warming up and 10-minutes after we arrived the ’82 All Whites were wheeled out.
They did a lap of the ground and the place went mental, the team fed off the
crowd and the crowd fed off Rufer, Sumner, Malcomson etc etc. I remember seeing
Ricki and Brian Turner head over to the boys and share an embrace with all of
them pitch-side. Everyone got what was at stake; everyone got what the occasion
met. The lap of honour must have taken 20-odd minutes because by the time Rufer
(who was straggling, doing it his own way…) was back in front of the Fever Zone
it was pretty chocka. He worked the zone into an absolute frenzy, it was
amazing. Rufer polarises a lot of people and has burned a lot of bridges in New
Zealand Football but that night you could see how much the national teal meant
to him. The ’82 boys formed a guard of honour as the team left the field after
warm ups. By this stage the stadium was almost full, literally everyone was in
white. It was an amazing effect. I can’t imagine the psychological boost it
gave to the All Whites, it must have been the most ridiculous feeling for guys
that so often played in front of 7-8,000 in the same stadium.
There is YouTube footage of the two teams in the tunnel
before they walk out, Rory Fallon and a couple of the other boys are talking
some smack, trying to get in the head of the Bahranians. It’s always easy to
say in hindsight but Fallon and others have said that when the Bahranies
wouldn’t look them in the eye in the tunnel they knew they had them. Fallon can
talk a good game, that’s for sure. Watching that video you can hear the crowd
in full voice, that couple of minutes as both teams waited in the tunnel and
emerged onto the field only reinforced the earlier perceptions of what the
night had become and what it was likely to turn into.
The atmopshere was more than just a wall of noise; you could
sense that it was more than that. Saying the atmosphere is electric is a
cliché, but that night it was. All over the ground you could hear pockets of
people starting chants. One of the vividest memories I have was watching
Bahrain take a corner in the opposite corner to the Fever zone (normally a sea
of yellow seats), the crowd raise and in unison gave him the “Who r Ya”. It was
quite remarkable. They key moments of the game are a bit of a blur, the one
thing I do have a strong recollection of is the header before we scored. I saw
it come off our head and go towards the goal, I couldn’t see the keeper and
assumed it was going in. I was in celebration mode and couldn’t figure out why
no one around me was going off. Turns out the keeper had made a miraculous
save. Didn’t matter, we scored minutes later and the place went bonkers. At
that stage we were going through, it may sound horrific but I still figured
they would score and we wouldn’t go through.
I guess that’s why the penalty that Lochy conceded had an
air of inevitability around it, ‘oh well, it was fun while it lasted. We’re not
going to the World Cup, I don’t know why we ever believed’. I guess that point
is where Fallons comments about them not being up for it comes through, the
penalty was simply simply awful. We were still 1-0 up; we were still going to
South Africa. They hardly fired a shot in those last 35-minutes; in fact we
probably should have got 1 or 2 during that period to really put the thing to
bed.
By this stage the whole crowd realised how big and how
special what was happening was, at 80-minutes the Fever Zone took their shirts
off, as is our tradition. Looking around the stadium though, people everywhere
had their shirts off. A mate of mine, who isn’t a massive football fan but
loves a good sporting occasion (as so many people could have been described
that night) described to me he and his Dad standing on their seats for the last
ten minutes with shirts waving round their heads. He still couldn’t talk on the
Monday. Like a few other events that I will write about during this series of
posts; I don’t remember the last five or so minutes. I recall the Smeltz shot,
which looked for so long like it was going in but I don’t really remember the
whistle blowing.
I danced around, hugged the people behind me (who had been
quite annoying all night), hugged my parents and danced around some more. The
music started blaring and continued while the All Whites did their lap of
honour, it took them a while to get to us but it was utter pandemonium the
whole time. Nike had produced some “White is the New Black” t-shirts which
while funny were an unnecessary cheap shot which told you quite a lot about the
psyche of many New Zealand football fans, something that I have watched in the
last few years. Looking around the zone, I felt so awesome for some of the
football-tragics I had met over the last few years. People who had ridden the
ups and downs of NZ Football as much as the players, nights like that were for
them. We stayed around the ground for a while before heading into town. Four
Kings was a no-go at that stage as the lines were simply to long so we ended up
at our local – the Kumara. The band was changing the words of songs to fit in
with the theme of the night, I seem to remember getting most of the bar to sing
a version of “Que se ra se ra – we’re going to Africa” while people dressed as
sheep and first years trying to get laid mingled and shared stories about the
night.
After one member of our group had fallen to sleep and been
kicked out we decided we would try FourKings, by this stage the line was
manageable so we head in and found ourselves a pretty good spot. They already
had a replay of the game on and they turned down the music so we could listen
to the commentary of the goal, the pub went mental. About this time a few of
the guys who I mentioned before, people who had been with Football through all
the shit showed up. I had a quick chat to them but by this stage they weren’t
in much of a state for a chat. If anyone deserved a hangover that night, it was
them.
As it turned out, November 14 was only the start of a pretty
remarkable journey the All Whites would take over the next few years. If you had said to me five years prior what
being there on a night like that would mean to me I would have laughed. Sure, I
liked football and I would support New Zealand in anything they did but the
notion of New Zealand even being in a position to play a game like that was
unthinkable. Australia moving to Asia changed all that. People will say that’s
the best sporting atmosphere they have ever been it, yeah it was amazing. Yeah,
it was a great occasion. But what I have learned over the last few years is
that all sporting occasions are different and are awesome for different
reasons.
It set pretty high expectations for the next
inter-continental playoff (should we make it). I think people will need to be
careful, don’t try and recreate November 14, 2009. You simply won’t be able to,
the backstory – 28 years of hurt, Fallon scoring the goal, the penalty save –
none of that will happen again. But should we qualify it will be just as
special to think that we are actually turning into a football nation.
November 14, whatever happens will always be one of the
great New Zealand sporting occasions. It meant so much to so many and to others
it simply meant a good night out. But what a good night it was!
